No doubt, many of the world's legendary drunks are turning in their graves. Some of them were fierce and formidable writers. Heroically intoxicated scribes like Hunter S Thompson and Tennessee Williams, Hemingway and Kerouac, Truman Capote and James Joyce. Essentially my heroes. Bless them all, but this is a story set in a brave new world, one in which boozing is on the decline, and — heaven help us — trends such as “sober curious” have been doing the rounds.
In fact, Sober Curious is the title of a six-year-old book chronicling the rising phenomenon of consciously choosing not to drink alcohol — at least not all the time. In its wake there've been legions of people appending #mindfuldrinking to pictures of themselves sipping New Age, booze-free elixirs while ripping up the town despite being completely level-headed.
Because, believe it or not, it's now perfectly fine — socially acceptable, even — to decline that drink.
This may or may not have anything to do with virtuosity, but in a country where it has almost always been borderline cringeworthy to admit that ‘I don't drink’, there's growing evidence that
